Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Katrina Twelve Years Later

Twelve Years Later

By

Debbie Lindsey

Every
day I pass her signature, stubborn and indelible, an autograph deeply imprinted
from the added force of incompetence and malfeasance. Katrina the hurricane, not The Flood, seemed to be saving her brute
force for others and would have made her debut in New Orleans somewhat
unremarkable if only the levees had done their job. But they didn’t and I am reminded of this
when I walk next to the three foot plus water line that remains on the glass
door and its curtain that has hung stained since that August day.

Every
year, the anniversary of Katrina and the levee failures is met with
diametrically opposing emotions and attitudes.
There are those who choose not to dwell on it and those (like me) who
have trouble letting it go. Some lives
were damaged beyond repair and others whose lives were lifted up. “Survivor guilt” is felt, to varying degrees,
by those who lived on the sliver by the river and escaped the waters. But no one, absolutely no one, was spared the
pain. And there is the collateral damage
to families and friends who sat helplessly watching it unfold on televisions
across the world. Sometimes I think my
sister, high and dry in Birmingham, was more frightened than we were here in
the midst of it all.

You
learn quickly who simply can’t talk about it and respectfully change
conversational course; but, most folks seem inclined to swap “war
stories”. Yes, it can be equated to
having gone through combat and surviving in a war zone. As with war veterans,
there is often that bonding, the camaraderie of commiseration that comes from
shared dangers and the experiences of living through something historical. And historical it was.

Katrina most certainly is something
for the history books, and I say “is” as it cannot be placed in the past tense
of “was”. Much of this saga belongs to
yesterday, however, we live in a landscape—organic, political, economic, and
societal—that is forever changed and/or evolving as a result of Katrina and the
levee malfunctions. There were
fifty-three breaches to our various canals and levees. To date this is the largest residential
disaster in U.S. history. A major
American city had its population reduced by half. This natural and man-made catastrophe stands
as this country’s costliest hurricane costing 135 billion just for NOLA. And to this day these stats differ with a
multitude of other sources yet all are shocking and admit to be record
breaking. The death toll will never be
certain.

Much has been reported, rumored, and
recounted about what took place during those days after the flood waters filled
our city. A great deal has been
discredited, such as alligators and sharks swimming about. Why the media wanted to dismiss this as urban
myth is beyond me. Certainly there were
alligators—did they think that the gator was going to stay in Bayou St. John as
its waters mingled with lake waters and not crawl or swim beyond some invisible
boundary? Heck a gentleman I knew was
hospitalized at Lindy Boggs hospital at the edge of Bayou St. John and told of
a rather large alligator in the building’s flooded lobby. As for sharks—well I
know a very credible source in Gentilly who watched a fin gliding past his
flooded home (just a bull shark perhaps).
When simple over-lapping of nature in otherwise urban environments
becomes a “tall tale” you can see how easy it was for people to discount the
truly shocking—things that folks simply could not wrap their heads around.

It truly was the wild, wild, west.
Anything could and did happen.
Heinous crimes and heroic deeds.
There was no precedent for the days and weeks that’s followed and
certainly nothing was even remotely normal for the next year; and even as a
rhythm reminiscent of life before Katrina slowly began to take root it would be
years before significant reparations and restorations would outnumber the look
and feel of a war zone.

Lessons
were taught and lessons were learned. We
know now to assume the worse from a storm and from our man-made
protections. But, and this is serious,
we can never become complacent. Have a
plan, whether it is to stay or to go. If
evacuation is not possible then have every possible safety plan in place along with
provisions. Stock non-perishable foods, a can opener, first-aid, pet supplies,
solar or battery lighting (never candles—we nearly torched our house during
Katrina), have prescriptions filled and zip-locked, and know that those cell
phones will not be reliable for extended power outages. Consider keeping or getting a land-line touch
tone phone. If totally dependent upon a cell
then have an external back-up battery, a car adapter to plug in and charge from
your car’s cigarette lighter. Before a possible
power loss charge phones, reduce to the cell phone’s lowest power mode, and
then back away from that device until truly needed for life-saving
communications.

Also
stock-up on lots of water, Pedialyte for hydration (my nerves and tainted foods
wrought serious diarrhea), moist-toilettes, bleach, and heavy-gage garbage bags.
And remember, that toilet ain’t gonna flush after several days (this is when
those garbage bags in addition to cleaning out your refrigerator will be
needed). If you stay for the next flood
you must remember what it was like twelve years ago. And for the many new residents too young to
have the Katrina Debacle in their memory’s reference--read about it now. I suggest: Chris Rose’s Pulitzer prize
nominated “One Dead in Attic”, Douglas Brinkly’s “The Great Deluge”, and Google
“17 of the Best Things Ever Written About Katrina” (HuffPost), for more informative
reads.

I often wonder how many folks I
crossed paths with during those couple of days leading up to Katrina’s landfall
that are no longer with us. We were the
lucky ones, the fools who rode it out. And,
for no good reason other than sheer luck am I able to sit and write about it
today—twelve years later. Consider this
a cautionary tale.